Professor Ole Jensen MSc, PhD

In 'People'

Contact details

School of PsychologyUniversity of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Professor Ole Jensen is a leading expert on neuronal oscillations in humans and animals. In his investigations he uses magnetoencephalography (MEG) in combination with other techniques. In 2016 he received the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. Jensen research is funded by a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator award, the James S. McDonnell Foundation and several EU Horizon 2020 Marie Curie fellowships.

Biography

Professor Ole Jensen did his MSc in electrical engineering at The Technical University of Denmark and Universite Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.He then completed his PhD in neuroscience at Brandeis University, US. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher specializing in MEG at the Low Temperature Laboratory at Helsinki University of Technology, Finland. Subsequently he worked as a principal investigator at The Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, The Netherlands where he was appointed Professor. Recently he took up the post of Professor at the University of Birmingham.

Research

The main goal of Ole Jensen’s research is to understand how oscillatory activity shapes the functional architecture of the working brain during cognitive processing. While modulations of alpha band oscillations (8-13 Hz) reflect anticipatory top-down modulation, bottom-up processing is reflected by gamma band synchronization (30-100 Hz). Specifically, the core hypothesis states that neuronal communication is gated by inhibitory alpha oscillations in task-irrelevant regions, thus routing information to task-relevant regions. According to this framework the brain can be studied as a network by investigating cross-frequency interactions between gamma and alpha activity. The research tools applied by Jensen’s group include computational modeling, MEG, EEG combined with fMRI, EEG combined with TMS and intracranial recordings. These tools are applied to investigate and interpret data from humans and animals performing

attention and memory tasks. Furthermore the group investigates these mechanism to understand the basis of attention problems in ADHD patients and the aging population.

Other activities

Ole Jensen is academic editors of the journal PLOS Biology and editorial board member of Brain Connectivity. He is frequently panel member of various funding organizations e.g. the Norwegian Research Council.

He is chair main organizer of the International Conference on Biomagnetism 2020 (BIOMAG2020) in Birmingham. He is member of the organizing committee of the International Conference of Cognitive Neuroscience 2017 (ICON), the program committee (mini-symposia) for the conference of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society and the program committee of the International Conference on Biomagnetism (BIOMAG).

Publications

Jensen has published more that 160 papers in internal peer reviewed journals (see http://www.neuosc.com).